Dear Gaia:

I re-read your posts on this thread and a bit of your words in previous threads. I did this so to refresh my memory and also to get a new understanding of what has been happening with you, so to offer you something new.

You titled your first thread July 2016 (you were 18 at the time), “Feeling like something is wrong with me”. Having re-read your posts, as well as the posts of hundreds of members on this site over the last 4.5 years, I believe that there is nothing wrong with you: your thinking is logical, consistent, you make sense and you are quite insightful. You are not the abnormal, weird, unusual alien specimen that you have thought you are (“Why can’t I be normal” is the title of your May 2018 thread). Really, you are very much human, no less than any other human, and not different in an unusual way, an outside-of human experience kind of way.

It has hurt you, no doubt, to have an “extra-sensitive, easily offended.. touchy.. easily moved to tears… crying and making it about her… parading how she works hard for us… make drama queen scenes.. yelling.. prone to pessimistic, heavy or theatrical on stuff.. crying or getting anxious instead of being soothing or more objective.. too sentimental and dramatic” mother. She robbed you of a carefree, light hearted life experience (“I resent her for making me less carefree in my young years”).

Having had bad social experiences at school, including bullying, especially in high school, hurt you further. A “full blown OCD at 16” made things a lot worse for you, increasing your feelings of being abnormal, bizarre, unacceptable.

What resulted from your social experiences at home and with your peers, is “taken by intense overwhelming uncomfortableness, cringeness, discomfort” in social situations. You wrote: “what caused a huge part of this cringeness is that I did a lot of embarrassing things and SAID embarrassing things” that “turned people off”. You wrote: “being in social situations trigger my self loathing, I simply can’t like myself when I’m around others”.

So much discomfort in interpersonal relationships and social situations (and when alone doing OCD things), that you found great comfort in fantasy and daydreaming: “fantasy worlds felt so good to me, like my soul was at peace.. I called it ‘home'”.

“Living in real life always made me feel that I’m dull, my life is dull”, but in your fantasy world you lived “adventurously and magically”, “sailing with pirates, or up with aliens.. a lost princess.. going back to fight the evil and take my place again”. You lived “behind close doors.. sleep late.. daydream on music”.

And so, other than your fantasy life, you spent your “teen years in a state of non life.. a zombie” “never dating or having intimacy with someone, crushing hard on strangers and not going out or having enough fun”, but you “saw peers with cool  groups, cool likes, cool social skills, cool boyfriends”, and felt that in comparison to them, you “had nothing”, missing “experiences and proper real crushes.. Youth.. feeling alive, joyous and fresh”.

Having spent so much time in fantasy, feeling home there, that when you enter real life social situations, it is “like I just entered another dimension that don’t belong to me”, a non-home. In fantasy you feel comfortable and life is effortless. In real life social situations, you feel dizzy, “subtly uncoordinated.. distant, somewhere else.. zone out every 5 minutes”, you “don’t know what to do with my hands and with my eyes, how to interact with all the things happening around.. my mind just can’t comprehend what happens around”

September 30 you started living Mon-Fri with other students, away from home. Yesterday, December 12, almost 2.5 months later, you wrote to me: “As you suggested, I’m trying to be more social and spend less time alone”, daydream less, and you are tying “not to stalk this guy who doesn’t reciprocate me on social networks”. You are still afraid to “be shamed or ridiculed”.

My input today- I see your greatest challenges as the following:

1. Overcoming the anger and jealousy at your peers.

2. Easing into social situations, learning how to present yourself and how to perform in social situations:

-noticing your posture, your body language.

-choosing your words (so to not regret what you say later).

-being patient with yourself when zoning out/ sort of disappearing, for not understanding what happened, what was said and done when you were zoned out, someone just said and so forth. Wake up again and again when you noticed that you zoned out and return to the here-and-now, to the social situation.

It will take patience and time to  practice these things, and it will take enduring your anger and jealousy, and intense frustration for having missed so much living in your lifetime. But if you practice, you will get more and more comfortable in social situations, until it finally feels .. like home,  until eventually you will be quite care free in those situations.

Post again anytime, good to read from you again!

anita